The Highest Climb

Each day the men climbed higher on the icy mountain cliffs. Finally they reached a narrow shelf of rock, where most of the tired party stopped to rest. But two men continued to climb from this high camp. The slippery rock made each step seem more difficult than the one before. In some places the two men had to cling to the steep rock like ants on a wall. The cold wind bit at their eyes and tugged at their clothes. It threatened to pull them loose from the mountain-to send them falling against the rock a thousand feet below.

The air was so thin that the two men had to breathe from tanks of oxygen strapped to their backs. They become so tired and cold that they could barely move. They looked back down the icy slope…down..down the black storm clouds. They were high above the clouds!They started climbing toward the top again. Would they make it?Everyone who had tried before had failed. Many had been killed trying to climb to the windy, snow-covered top of this high mountain.

Slowly,steadily they kept climbing until they reached the last icy cliff. They knew they were close to the top. But how close? Blinding, swirling snow kept them from seeing. They kept climbing anyway. They had to chop places in the ice for their hands and feet. They keep on blindly until finally when they reached to feel the rock ahead, there was no rock. They knew then that they had reached the top.

It was on May 29,1953 that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. They were the first men ever do this. Mount Everest is in the Himalayan Mountains between India and China.